Table of Contents
Maree Buske
Maree Buske was born and raised in Gisborne and has had a career trajectory that is far from linear. From working in retail to a five year stint in local radio and a period in brewing and manufacturing; the scope of work has allowed Maree to meet some incredible individuals, entrepreneurial thinkers and authentic everyday New Zealanders.
This book is a deeply unsettling and gut wrenching work that seeks to expose one of the most disturbing allegations in modern geopolitics: the systematic harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience in China. Drawing on years of investigative research, interviews, and previously published reports, Jekielek outlines in crystal clear clarity a truth that is as morally confronting as it is politically charged.
At the heart of the book is the claim that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has developed an industrial-scale system of forced organ harvesting, targeting groups such as Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, and other political or religious detainees. Jekielek presents this not as isolated abuse, but as a state-sanctioned enterprise embedded within China’s medical and security apparatus. According to the book, the availability of organs on demand, sometimes within mere days, not months or years as it is in the West, raises troubling questions about the source of these organs and suggests the existence of a living donor pool that can be accessed at will. Essentially: when you run the numbers, they simply don’t stack up.
What makes Killed to Order particularly compelling is not just its documentation of alleged human rights abuses, but its broader argument about the true nature of the CCP itself. Jekielek portrays the regime as one that instrumentalises every aspect of society, medicine, law, and even human life, for political control and profit. Forget panda propaganda, this is serpentine stealth across not years, but decades, even centuries if required. In this framing, forced organ harvesting becomes a window into a larger system defined by coercion, secrecy, and utilitarian ethics, where individual lives are nothing more than subjugated sub-humans who become products to be converted into profit by the state.
The book is written in such a way to hold the reader’s hand from disbelief to reluctant acknowledgment. Jekielek anticipates skepticism, indeed, the allegations are so extreme that they challenge the reader’s moral imagination, and addresses it by layering testimonies, statistical anomalies, and investigative findings, allowing you as a reader to take on board the chilling reality one step at a time. While some critics point out gaps in verifiability, Jekeilek addresses this in the conclusion of the book, listing all the common objections concisely and allowing you to make up your own mind of their voracity.
Beyond the immediate issue of organ harvesting, Killed to Order expands into a broader geopolitical critique. Jekielek argues that Western nations, through economic dependence on Chinese manufacturing, technology, and supply chains, have become entangled in a system that enables and indirectly legitimises these abuses. A sort of see no evil, hear no evil or speak no evil willful blindness of Western consumers, including here in New Zealand. Kiwi lawmakers and trade envoys have been selling their souls to the CCP in order to protect our outsourced cheaply manufactured, delivered just in time goods in return for them buying our primary products for years, always on their terms and often with Kiwi farmers being shafted in the process.
Jekeilek describes this dependence as a form of “non-violent warfare,” where influence is exerted not through military force but through economic leverage, information control, and institutional infiltration. This perspective positions the CCP not merely as a domestic authoritarian regime, but as a strategic actor seeking global influence and compliance. A dance we have witnessed time and again in our own interactions with our largest trading partner. This aspect of the book is likely to be the most controversial. While concerns about supply chain dependence and political influence are quietly discussed in trade bubbles, Jekielek presents them in stark, almost blunt terms that would likely ‘spook the horses’ in some circles.
The link between CCP influence in global non sovereign organisations such as the WHO, which is discussed in the book, and the tactics that the CCP use to exert the wider will of the party allow you draw a direct comparison on how their Covid pandemic response not only influenced here, but the Ardern government was likely influenced by the authoritarian, then totalitarian tactics, even if she called it kindness: this too comes straight from the CCP playbook.
This book’s content is difficult to read and confront, but it is almost impossible to put it down. I completed it in just two sittings. Like a rubbernecker watching a tragic accident on the side of the road, most of us gawk for a moment before driving by, but in Killed to Order Jekeilek calls to your conscience. Whether one agrees with all of its conclusions or not, it compels readers to confront uncomfortable possibilities about modern China, global complicity, and the ethical cost of globalisation and for us, in whatever way we can, not to drive on by, but to act and speak out.
Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary by Jan Jekielek – available now.
This article was originally published by RCR Media.
